Dutch Rojas

Dear Congresswoman DeGette: Let's stay in Colorado for a moment. @uchealth has been acquiring independent physician practices across your state for years. They've also been found to have egregious collection practices, but you already knew that. The moment independent practices are acquired by a hospital system, the reimbursement rate for the exact same service, same physician, same procedure, same patient increases substantially. Not because the care improved. Because the billing address changed. That is the facility fee arbitrage. Taxpayers fund it. Patients pay for it. And it is entirely legal because Congress has not passed site-neutral payment reform. Do you support site-neutral payments? Because if you do not, you are not talking about affordability. You are performing it. And while we are here, did you support price-transparency enforcement? Did you vote to lift the moratorium on physician-owned hospitals under Section 6001? Because the moratorium does not protect patients. It protects systems like UCHealth from physician competition. It removes the only market mechanism that disciplines price. You have a taxpayer-subsidized nonprofit system in your state systematically eliminating for-profit independent physicians, the very physicians who have skin in the game, and replacing them with employed practitioners inside a cost-plus billing structure that answers to no market signal whatsoever. That is not healthcare. That is a protected monopoly wearing a university logo. If the Congresswoman is serious, she's not; she's a washed-up politician. Nevertheless, the path runs through HHS, CMS, and three specific votes. FYI, the HHS building is within walking distance of your office...